I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.
Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.
All great achievements require time.
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you'll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.
I believe that every person is born with talent.
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
I am grateful to be a woman. I must have done something great in another life.
The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.
You can't forgive without loving. And I don't mean sentimentality. I don't mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, 'I forgive. I'm finished with it.'
During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.
If I walked into the kitchen without washing my hands as a kid, I'd hear a loud 'A-hem!' from my mother or grandmother. Now I count on other people to do the same.
We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay - and rise!
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
My mom was a terrible parent of young children. And thank God - I thank God every time I think of it - I was sent to my paternal grandmother. Ah, but my mother was a great parent of a young adult.
Until blacks and whites see each other as brother and sister, we will not have parity. It's very clear.
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there's no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.
Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn't accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else's insistence or someone else's whim or convenience.
I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that.
I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: 'I'm with you kid. Let's go.'
I love the song 'I Hope You Dance' by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it.
The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.
Eating is so intimate. It's very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you're inviting a person into your life.
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.
Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.
The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.
I wasn't a pretty girl. I was six feet tall at 15, you know.
